


The answer would always be yes.

by witheredsong



Category: Football RPF
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-12
Updated: 2015-09-12
Packaged: 2018-04-20 10:47:28
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,007
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4784531
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/witheredsong/pseuds/witheredsong
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"He drives around aimlessly for long minutes, hours, the windows down, frigid air slapping across his face, fingers going numb, cutting into his lungs like knives."</p>
            </blockquote>





	The answer would always be yes.

The shouting match with Toni ends spectacularly, with him punching a hole through the living-room wall and her throwing the crystal vase at his head. He ducks, the vase shatters into a thousand glittering shards, and his daughter chooses that moment to peep in and then begin to hiccup with loud sobs.

Toni crosses over to Summer and kneels to take her in her arms, his baby girl won’t stop her awful hiccupping tears, and he stands helplessly, feeling wretched, furious, wrecked. Merry Christmas, indeed.

Toni stands up with summer on her hips, looking sad and unhappy, the strain tightening around her eyes and thinned lips, looking tired, looking lost. “John”, she says, and then stops, biting her lower lip hard, so that it goes white. “John. Just go. For tonight. I can’t bear to be with you tonight. Go!” Her voice rises on the last word, on the verge of hysteria, and Summer, who had temporarily quieted, and had been turning to look between her parents with large tear-filled eyes, starts to cry again. He crosses the room, picks up his jacket and keys, and steps out into the freezing cold. The sound of her screams, (Daddy! Daddy don’t go!) now twined with Georgie’s, and Toni’s frantic hushing, follows him out into the night, wrenching his heart.

He drives around aimlessly for long minutes, hours, the windows down, frigid air slapping across his face, fingers going numb, cutting into his lungs like knives. He drives through dark streets, illumined by street-lamps, and warm lights accompanied by sounds of laughter and conversations filtering from houses, intensifying his loneliness.

His phone rings. He doesn’t pick up, wounded, raw and vulnerable. It rings ten times, twenty, thirty. Cuts to his voicemail, and then, there’s Frank. He is worried, angry. “John, please don’t be lying dead in a ditch somewhere. Pick up the bloody phone.” Another one, five minutes later, as he sits in the pitch darkness of the car near some place beside the Thames, lights reflected dimly on its oily surface. “John.” Frank sounds unsure, afraid. “John, please be okay. Please.” It sounds more like a prayer than something addressed to John. “Please, please, please pick up the phone. Toni called me. She’s scared. She’s angry, okay, but you went out without a scarf or coat, just your jacket, and it’s –5 C out, there’s frost, John. If you don’t want to go home, come to me, we’ll deal with this, we always do. Just be okay. Come to me. I’m waiting.”

Toni probably thought he’d go to Frank directly, he reflects bitterly. And truth be told, he didn’t blame her. Because that’s what he always did. Does. Used to. Any hurt, and he’d turn to Frank. But sometimes, he’s reminded of where he comes from, he’s reminded that he’s the poor boy from Barking, with a dealer for a father and a shop-lifter for a mom, and he’ll never measure up, he’ll never be anything but the boy with the torn boots two sizes small, fighting for scraps that life’ll give him, he’ll never be good enough. And the differences with Frank loom high, the public school, the latin, the footballer father, the gentlemanliness. The bitterness. At those moments, he’s reminded that if not for football, they’d never have been friends, he’d never have loved Frank, ruffled his hair, known the warmth his mouth after the tenth kiss, never could have been loved back. And in those moments, he can’t forgive himself, and he can’t forgive Frank, or Toni, or his parents, or football.

The car is growing cold, battery running low, and his head aches. The phone rings again, and he picks it up with numbed fingers. Frank breathes a “John. Thank God”, and then goes to furious in two seconds flat. “You utter piece of shit. You couldn’t have answered the first twenty times I called or Toni did? Do you know how worried we are? You come here within the next 35 minutes, or swear to God, JT, I am informing the police.”

Laughter bubbles out of him, uncontrollably, like tears only more painful, and Frank’s voice softens, his accent sharpening. “It’s not so bad. We’ll drink coffee, and we’ll watch Wall-E and in the morning I’ll scramble eggs and cook sausages. I’ll even let you read the sports-section first. Don’t stay out in the cold. Come to me, okay?”

When he speaks, his voice is rusty and hoarse with the cold, and he feels like Georgie, cajoled into giving in after a sulk, “The sports-section first, promise?” Frank laughs and replies, relief evident in his voice, fond, “Yes John. Promise. I am waiting, come.”

When he pulls up in front of Frank’s townhouse, the white walls gleaming in the dark, for a second, the hurt surfaces with heart-clenching violence and he contemplates pulling away, roaming London’s dark lamp-lit fog-obscured frosty streets until dawn. But then, Frank is coming down the slippery steps quickly, quick enough to break his neck, and he thumps on the window of John’s car with barely restrained impatience. John steps out and almost falls, his body stiff with the cold and hours spent driving, sitting numbly in the darkness. Frank slips an arm around his waist, his fingers like a brand of warmth on his chilled tee-shirt, and he leans on Frank, as they climb up the frost-lined stairs in to the warmth and comfort of Frank’s home.

Frank leaves him standing in the middle of the room and goes to quickly turn up the temperature. His face is tight with worry, his shoulders straight and stiff, hair in tufts from all the tousling he must have done while trying to reach him, John realizes. The relief of being in there with him is overwhelming, humbling. Frank stands in front of him, and just looks at his face, at a loss of words, then simply steps forward to wrap his arms around John, tight, rests his face alongside John’s and just holds him. Warmth soaks into John, and with it, the anguish and uncertainty that had been like a razor under his skin since the tabloid expose, lessens its intensity of pain and grief, and he starts trembling like a leaf. Frank just tightens his arms and kisses whatever part of John he can reach, murmuring incoherent words which make no sense, words which only convey the bone-deep fear and anxiety of pacing alone in a too big, too silent house, not knowing where a loved one might be roaming in the cold darkness, waiting and hoping they’d find their way home.

Frank takes his hand and leads him to his bedroom up the stairs, like a child, and John follows, too tired to protest, trusting Frank. Frank makes him sit on the bed and kneels in front of him, untying his sneakers’ laces and pulling them off. He looks up at John through his lashes, intent and worried, and John bends down to kiss his eyes, stroking Frank’s nape, where his fingers find familiar purchase. Frank shivers hard once and bows his head, then, he stands and pulls John up too. “Come on, Johnny, we need to get you into the shower, you’re as cold as an icicle.” He pulls John’s tee-shirt up and over his head, and unbuttons his jeans so that he can step out of his jeans and boxers, easy and familiar and just as tender as a parent or an older brother. He goes in to the en-suite, runs the shower, adjusting the controls on the panel until the hot water fogs up the glass door. He pushes John into the spray, and the hot water makes his chilled skin come up in goose-bumps, feeling returning in pins and needles. Frank steps in too, still wearing his tee and sweats, lathers up the wash-cloth and carefully runs it over John’s arms and back, washes his chest, and kneels again, lifting each foot, running the soapy cloth over his feet, each ridge and callus, then up and up to the soft skin of his belly, just over his groin, more a caress, and John’s body fights between tiredness and the ever present, desperate hunger for Frank. Frank shuts the water and wraps John in a blue fluffy towel warmed on the radiator, steps out of his own sodden clothes and raps another towel around his own waist, then tells him, “Dry up and wear something of mine, while I get you some soup, okay?” He touches to fingers to John’s cheekbone, a quick light brush, and goes downstairs.

He searches Frank’s wardrobe and puts on a pair of his ratty blue Chelsea sweats and an old old white tee-shirt. It has three holes on the left shoulder and one on the hem. It smells of pinecones and detergent and Frank. He gets into bed, shivering, exhausted, mind finally quiet, and Frank comes in with a bowl of steaming chicken soup. While he endeavours to spoon the soup into his mouth and not spill it on the bedclothes, Frank calls Toni. He is smiling and reassuring her, “Yes, Ton, he’s with me. Yes, he’s okay. A day or two maybe, is that alright?”, there must be some irony in Frank calling his wife, but John can’t figure out what it is, while his eyelids flutter close, and the soup-bowl tilts dangerously close to spilling. Frank ends the call and rescues the bowl, and eases John into a horizontal position. When he’s pulling the blanket snug around John, John fists his fingers around Frank’s shirt, says, “Don’t leave me.” Frank sighs and lies down, pulling the cover close over them both, and John shuffles close, tucks his chin on Frank’s shoulder, pulls his hand around his waist, and between on breath and the next, is asleep.

When he wakes up some indeterminate time later, warm and rested, Frank is sitting up in bed beside him, awake, breathing quietly in the darkness. It’s not morning yet, and the darkness is safe for conversations they don’t usually have.

“Don’t scare me like that again, okay?”, he says, voice gone suddenly rough. John hears the unsaid, the loss of a mother, a partner, two daughters. The loss of a way of life. They lead uncertain lives, he and Frank, always, always fighting against the next loss, the next-career-ending injury, the next transfer-season, the next tabloid-revelation. The art of losing. That Frank twines into him, a shock of recognition that binds them in spite of history, of class, of probabilities, is a miracle, the thread tenous, probability of loss always present, contemplation of it always unbearable. A dream of the impossible. Every time they do something foolish, they wound each other, tear each other a little more apart.

John pulls Frank down to him, and kisses his eyelids, his stubble rough cheeks, his lovely lovely lips, every tiny caress an apology, an acknowledgement of the unspoken. He murmurs “Darling, darling, sweetheart”, with every thrust as Frank opens under him, beautifully easy, familiar and cherished, locks his legs around John’s waist and pulls him down into strangely soft kisses, and John watches the shifting emotions of Frank’s face in the lamplight, gone primal and open and vulnerable in his pleasure, drunk with the closeness, in the fulfillment of all they crave and yearn for, and what they are denied so often.

In the morning, they’ll kiss in the shower and then dress each other, doing each other’s buttons up, punctuated with impatient caresses. Frank will scramble eggs and John will read the sports section, and then they’ll drive to Cobham. On the way John’ll call Tony and apologize, and Frank will drive quietly, humming along to the radio.

Just before they alight, in the relative privacy of the car with the tinted glasses, Frank will kiss John, desperate and hungry, one last time, and then, they’ll put on their laughing faces, and walk into the practice grounds together. They’ll walk close side-by-side, shoulders bumping, fingers brushing in tiny unseen gestures of comfort.


End file.
